My finger points to Rafael Palmeiro when asked to identify the quintessential first baseman of the 1990s. The position yielded others who were better overall hitters; Certainly guys such as Jeff Bagwell or Frank Thomas qualify as such, and Mark McGwire was a bigger bopper. But Palmeiro also embodies two other qualities: Being a left-hander, he had a naturally iconic swing and soft hands on defense, and was aesthetically more pleasing to watch -- like guys such as Mark Grace, Will Clark and John Olerud. Finally, his role in the steroid scandal -- whether it be classified as a participant, pawn or patsy -- must be accounted for.
Corban Goble is a Royals fan. He writes about music for Time Out New York. Find him on Twitter @corbangoble.
The first baseman of the ’90s was definitely Frank Thomas and it really wasn’t because I got to watch him play—I honestly don’t remember watching many baseball games growing up. I vaguely remember his Nike shoes being somewhat boss. But what I do remember, solidly, is that the Big Hurt had one of the huge circles in Ken Griffey Jr. Baseball for Nintendo 64—only eight in the game had a huge circle and Thomas was the only first baseman—so that’s what seals it for me.
If you're of a certain age or frequently stay up past what most consider "a reasonable time," you are likely familiar with the above image. I fit both of those criteria, so “Major League Super Star” Fred McGriff sticks out for me as the quintessential 1990s first baseman.
Who could be more 90s than the star of the most 90s infomercial ever ("used by Baseball World's back-to-back-to-back AAU national championship teams!")? Fred McGriff was consistently very good and occasionally excellent. He was the Bravesiest Brave during a decade in which the Braves’ very-goodness defined baseball, and during a time when I considered giving up on the sport all together, McGriff became the reason I stuck around.
One of my early baseball memories is attending a late-September game at Wrigley Field in which the Cubs defeated the Mets behind Mitch Williams' only career home run. Or maybe it isn't. I had a Mitch William autograph and maybe my dad only told me it came from that game to make it even more exciting.
Either way, I was a Cubs fan, and that homer stuck with me as I watched Mitch, by then a Philly, give up a walk-off home run to Joe Carter in Game 7 of the 1993 World Series. 1993 was one of the first years I starting watching baseball actively. The Cubs had a fun team. Sammy Sosa broke out; Mark Grace provided his steady hand and seemed to hit only doubles; Ryne Sandberg was there. The team finished 84-78, and the future seemed relatively bright. Very-goodness was right around the corner.
Tuffy Rhodes homered three times on opening day in 1994. Sosa was a year older. Dunston was back from injury, Steve Trachsel presented himself as a perfectly acceptable starting pitcher; they still had Ryno; they still had Grace hitting only doubles. Hell, in 1994, I'd have put Randy Myers up against any closer in the game. "Dennis Eckers-who? Lee Smith what? Randy had 53 saves last year."
Then Ryne Sandberg shocked Chicago and abruptly retired in June. The team was already mired in a disastrous campaign and stood at 23-37. In all honesty, I had checked out of 1994 well before the strike rolled around. And with the retirements of Sandberg and Michael Jordan happening within a year of each other, I was in danger of losing two of my favorite Chicago icons. Scottie Pippen still kept me warm at night, but my interest in baseball threatened to disappear altogether.
This is where my internal Behind The Music narrator says something like, Little did he know, his salvation would come from a most unlikely source.
Enter Fred McGriff.
Around the time of the strike, my family ordered cable TV for the first time, and with the new baseball season, I discovered the weird and wonderful world of Atlanta Braves on TBS: The Superstation. I had never realized that the Cubs were not the only team on TV—a very solipsistic Cubs fan notion, I know. But there were the Braves, playing the same game in the far off land of Atlanta, and playing it remarkably well.
Greg Maddux, so recently a Cub, went HAM that year; Smoltz and Glavine turned in routine seasons by their own high standards; Chipper Jones came very close to winning Rookie of the Year; David Justice was not yet known exclusively as the man Halle Barry had to file a restraining order against; Ryan Klesko seemed like a name to keep an eye on. That team had Javy Lopez, too. The good Javy Lopez. These Braves were very good, and what's more, their very-goodness hadn’t dropped out of the sky. It wasn't contingent on a couple of splashy free-agent signings. It was home-grown, by and large, the result of a lot of careful cultivation, and for that reason, the Braves’ very-goodness in the mid-1990s looked like nothing less than a permanent condition. They were everything my Cubs weren't.
Yes, Sammy Sosa and Mark Grace were both phenomenal that season. But Todd Zeile was not Larry Jones; Scott Servais would never be confused with Javy Lopez; and, bless him, Jamie Navarro (14-6/3.28/200.1 IP/1.248 WHIP) was not Greg Maddux. My predominant Cubs memories from that season are of Howard Johnson hitting a few pitch-hit home runs; Howard Johnson having a name like the motel chain (something I could relate to; and Brian McRae stretching an opponent’s single into a double one afternoon on account of some lackadaisical centerfield play. Even with Grace and his doubles and Sosa looking faintly like the next Clemente, that Cubs team defined tedium. They were aggressively mediocre, and that was probably the only aggressive quality about them.
His style was the absence of style.
But over on TBS, the Braves were a machine. And the central cog on offense was Fred McGriff. He led the team in hits, doubles, total bases, and RBIs. He was the ur-Brave: unassuming, efficient, somewhat silly when you thought about it -- a nickname based on a cartoon anti-crime advocate? C'mon -- never the best but always around. I suppose you could say McGriff was swag before we knew what swag was. His style was the absence of style. “This is the video that gets results,” he once said in a commercial, and people still talk about it. And can sports get any more banal than this?
McGriff's nickname "Crime Dog" was bestowed on him by ESPN sportscaster Chris Berman, noted for his unusual and idiosyncratic player nicknames. … At first, McGriff stated he would prefer "Fire Dog" (a reference to a fire in the press-box of Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium the day the Braves acquired him from the Padres; symbolically, the then-slumping Braves "caught fire" and ended up winning their division), but since has stated that he actually is fond of the "Crime Dog" nickname.
In 1995, the Braves took down the Indians (oh, those poor, poor 90s Indians) in six. Even if you didn’t cheer for them, you had to respect what they had accomplished. The Braves made very-goodness look easy, and they had done so long enough that they had finally achieved, in the form of a World Series victory, greatness. Why couldn't my Cubs replicate their success? How come the closest they came to playing Atlanta Braves baseball was when they foolishly imported putative Cub-killer Jeff Blauser? Why masochistically follow the Cubs when quality was just the next superstation -- and television station -- over?
Later, it would occur to me that baseball fandom didn’t have to be so self-lacerating, that it didn’t have to be about waiting endlessly for that one, great, dizzying orgasm, that it could be about watching home-grown very-goodness, year after year after year. Cubdom was and still is predicated on attaining that orgasm, from the fans up to the front office, even if it means mortgaging the team’s future; Bravedom, McGriffdom, was about brutal consistency, about staying out of the valleys, about simple competence and, as the man himself said, getting results.
Bravedom, McGriffdom, was about brutal consistency, about staying out of the valleys, about simple competence and, as the man himself said, getting results.
In 1998, McGriff decamped for the Tampa Bay Baseball Collective Previously Known As Vinny Castilla And The Devil Rays, where he played well, grinding away in a backwater no one cared about.
In 2001, the Cubs were contending. John Lieber was flirting with the idea of becoming an ace; Sosa had seemingly slugged his way past Clemente and was enjoying the best season of his career; Kerry Wood was showing Kerry Woodian flashes of brilliance; things were looking like they tend to look when Cubs fans become more optimistic than usual. But first base was a hole. Grace was let go the previous offseason. Matt Stairs was an admirable player (very grok, that man), and Julio Zuleta was too raw for the here-and-now; they wouldn't cut it.
You think:
They need to make a move. Look at that, Fred McGriff is toiling away in obscurity, but he looks like he's putting it all together again. Ed Lynch, Andy MacPhail? You know what you have to do: whatever it takes to get the Tribune Co. to open their coffers. You let Grace walk away, you bastards, do what's right. McGriff was there when I saw how a real team could play well together for the first time. McGriff is why I like baseball. You need to make that trade.
In my bones I knew this trade would be just another Cubs trade—the sort of move the very-good Braves never had to make: something splashy to momentarily achieve maximum levels of fan optimism; a Band-Aid stretched over a fracture. McGriff was just the latest in a long line of quick-fixes. The Cubs importing the epitome of 90s Braveness was the epitome of any-decade Cubness. Still, without those quick fixes, Cubs fans would be forced to more closely examine what they allowed to happen to themselves each and every year.
You need to make that trade.
And they did. He came over. He raked. The Cubs lost. He left. I didn't. The sun rose.
Kris Liakos mined the human condition at Walkoff Walk. He writes about the popular culture for ESPN the Magazine and happens to be looking for a bass player in the Brooklyn area. He tweets @k_liakos.
To lots of baseball fans Mo Vaughn is a punchline. After leaving Boston, he became the most rotund person example in a long line of fat contracts that never really panned out. It was easy to laugh. While America was eating itself out of its too snug box seats, at least they weren’t making $80M while they did it.
But to Red Sox fans of certain age (specifically mine, write what you know) Mo Vaughn was more than the most famous athlete in the city during the mid 90s. Back then he was still larger in the figurative sense than he was in his figure. As I -- we -- remember it, the Hit Dog (a once clever nickname turned cruel)'s 1995 MVP season was a true revelation. One of our guys was better than any of yours. And with the foregone conclusion that the Red Sox just were not going to win anything as a team, (validated by a loss to the Indians in that postseason) this was something we could take home and talk about over the winter when we weren’t slamming each others’ faces into snowbanks.
Mo got even better at the plate, improving on his MVP year OPS in each of the next 3 seasons. It was hard to find a more aesthetically entertaining hitter. Batting from the left side and practically burying his head in his right arm, home runs seemed to spring out from his chest instead of off his bat. It was kinda reckless, kinda pretty and reaching out to go the opposite way almost made him fall over. Every time.
He was also the city’s most prominent go-to charity guy; a good way to get to the people on his side in a place where black athletes have never felt comfortable. But crashing his car on the way home from a strip club and accusing the front office of having him trailed by private eyes didn’t engender the same goodwill . Working for Dan Duquette would make anybody go a little animal crackerz, and suddenly Mo wanted out and Sox brass was all too happy to let him leave.
Though he hit 69 ding dongs in Anaheim, he was no longer towering over a franchise like he had in Boston and was never again the face of anything (other than the ineptness of Steve Phillips, though Steve Phillips’ actual stupid face should have sufficed). Health problems ended his career and bad mojo overshadowed his legacy. In the years between the 90s and now, those same things happened to a lot of us. But together with the Hit Dog will always have that heyday.
A few weeks from now, if all goes well, I’m going to become a father. This would finally make me an adult, I guess. A man.
I’m old for a first-time father. I hit the legal age of manhood, which is to say the age at which it becomes legal to buy and consume alcoholic beverages, way back in 1989. Shortly thereafter, as a new decade was getting underway, I exited college and, at least according to the general understanding of such things, officially began my adult life, which is to say I got a job.
At this job, at a liquor store in Manhattan, my most common duty was ringing up sales on a cash register at the counter near the front of the store. There wasn’t a constant stream of customers at that store, so I was never chained to that duty. But it seems to have been the one among all my duties—which also included sweeping up, restocking shelves, stacking full boxes of wine or liquor in the basement, breaking up and tying empty boxes in the basement, eyeballing potential shoplifters, recommending wine, and going on deliveries—that has lodged itself in my subconscious mind. I still have dreams every once in a while in which I’m back at the cash register trying to ring up a sale, and in the dream I keep fucking up the sequence of buttons I’m supposed to push, and the register locks up, and I can’t figure out how to fix it, and a line of customers builds up behind the counter, growing angrily impatient at my flustered ineptitude: an anxiety dream, a dream of being helpless in the adult world. Long stretches go by where I don’t have this dream, suggesting that such deep-seated anxieties are behind me, but I just had it again last week.
I got paid in cash from the store, a few twenties every Friday, and to that I added whatever crumpled bills I’d get as tips while on deliveries. Sometimes the deliveries were made on sunny mornings to dark apartments with mortuary aromas. One old woman, a regular, would usually start to cry whenever I delivered a bottle to her.
“I just lost my sister,” she would say, sobbing. The first time she said it, I thought the “just” part was true, but after she kept looping around to it again and again on most every delivery, I understood that it was something she couldn’t break out of, and that even if it had happened a half a century ago it was still happening. He seemed to us to have gravity, to emit an aura of boldness and confidence
Last week I had a dream that I was back in the house I grew up in, and someone had left the door to the outside open, and both of my cats were near the door, curious, clearly on the brink of darting outside. That house was near a road that killed animals. In the dream, I slammed the door shut but there was this sense of unstoppable disorder, a guarantee that the door would be left open again and there’d be no way for me to keep my cats safe.
I spent my liquor store pay on rent for the apartment I shared with my brother and also on cheap starchy food and booze. I found comfort in my Sunday hangovers. They defused the anxious promise of that day, my one day of the week when I didn’t have to put in a shift at the store. The Sunday hangovers gave me the feeling that I had some gravity, that I had some connection to the ground. Sometimes on Sundays my brother and I would meet our dad at a diner on First Avenue. We had not grown up with him and the Sunday breakfasts were partly an attempt to make up for lost time, I guess. The diner served kielbasa as a breakfast side, and the giant split-open sausages made, along with eggs and toast and hash browns, for a gigantic breakfast feedbag, and my brother and I would chow down identical heart-attack meals while our father, who’d battled high blood pressure and heart issues, lectured us on our bad eating habits and nibbled butterless pancakes. I don’t remember what else we talked about.
In those days my brother and I fixated on a player who was holding down the first base position for on our favorite team, the Red Sox. His name was Carlos Quintana. He seemed to us to have gravity, to emit an aura of boldness and confidence, but quietly, modestly, a guy to be counted on, a man. We called him that, a man. We said, Here is a man. He was one of those players who for whatever reason always seemed to come through in crucial spots whenever we happened to be watching, and so for that reason we developed great confidence in his abilities. We wanted him to be up in a big spot. He had cajones, we said. He was not afraid. He would come through.
Two nights ago I had a dream where I couldn’t find a place to be. First I was looking for a class, geometry, and I kept getting shuttled to different rooms, different sections, each day another classroom to search for, and I kept falling farther behind. I ended up in a class full of middle-aged adults crowded around tables, a class that would again turn out to not be my correct class, though I didn’t know at first, and so I searched for a seat, and the only table with an open chair was one that was otherwise surrounded by people who were weeping.
Carlos Quintana’s numbers do not seem all that impressive in retrospect. He had no speed and didn’t have a whole lot of power, either. He was young, though, and so he was promising, and had that one quality I most lacked, solidity, so it was easy to imagine that the Red Sox had found a franchise cornerstone for years to come. This solidity proved an illusion, as it always will, though usually in not so spectacular a fashion as happened with Carlos Quintana, whose career was derailed by injuries suffered in an offseason car accident while rushing to the hospital to get care for his two brothers, who were bleeding from gun-shot wounds. Quintana missed the entire 1992 season, and in 1993 he came back but, still affected by the injuries from the accident, performed poorly in his sporadic opportunities (Mo Vaughn had grabbed the regular first base job in Quintana’s absence), and his major league career came to an end.
Last night I had a dream that I was driving and I couldn’t find the brake pedal and was hurtling toward an intersection where the light was about to turn red.
Sometimes after those kielbasa breakfasts on First Avenue we’d walk with our dad through the Lower East Side, where he’d grown up, and he’d tell us all the things that had changed. Everything had changed. He’d go back to his apartment and my brother and I, if it was a nice day, would wander into Tompkins Square Park and sit on a bench. Did this ever actually happen? It seems like it could have, but who knows—nothing is solid, least of all memories. But let’s say that my brother would have bought the bulging Sunday New York Times. We’d share out the sections. Bullshit time, nothing time, life will last forever time. An article about a Robert Altman festival, a review of a Don DeLillo novel, a box score featuring Carlos Quintana knocking in some runs.
“What a man,” I would say, and my brother would understand.
Dave Brown writes about baseball at Yahoo!'s Big League Stew. You can find him on Twitter @answerdave.
My finger points to Rafael Palmeiro when asked to identify the quintessential first baseman of the 1990s. The position yielded others who were better overall hitters; Certainly guys such as Jeff Bagwell or Frank Thomas qualify as such, and Mark McGwire was a bigger bopper. But Palmeiro also embodies two other qualities: Being a left-hander, he had a naturally iconic swing and soft hands on defense, and was aesthetically more pleasing to watch -- like guys such as Mark Grace, Will Clark and John Olerud. Finally, his role in the steroid scandal -- whether it be classified as a participant, pawn or patsy -- must be accounted for.
If you're of a certain age or frequently stay up past what most consider "a reasonable time," you are likely familiar with the above image. I fit both of those criteria, so “Major League Super Star” 
But over on TBS, the Braves were a machine. And the central cog on offense was Fred McGriff. He led the team in hits, doubles, total bases, and RBIs. He was the ur-Brave: unassuming, efficient, somewhat silly when you thought about it -- a nickname based on a cartoon anti-crime advocate? C'mon -- never the best but always around. I suppose you could say McGriff was swag before we knew what swag was. His style was the absence of style. “This is the video that gets results,” he once said in a commercial, and people still 
